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THE OPEN VEINS OF CUBAN MIGRATION: ECONOMIC AND REFUGEE POLICY EN NUESTRA AMÉRICA by BRYCE A. SPRAUER A THESIS Presented to the Department of International Studies and the Robert D. Clark Honors College in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Bachelor of Arts November 2018 An Abstract of the Thesis of Bryce A. Sprauer for the degree of Bachelor of Arts in the Department of International Studies to be taken November, 2018. Title: The Open Veins of Cuban Migration: Economic and Migration Policy en Nuestra América. Approved: _______________________________________ Daniel J. Tichenor The Americas can be observed as an active conflict zone, both by armed violence and economic violence. Through a framework of conflict analysis between the United States and Cuba, this research aims to answer the following questions: What are the historical, geopolitical and economic factors that shape the ongoing conflict as well as the migration and refugee policies between Cuba and the United States? What are the effects of these policies in the lives of Cuban migrants? These questions allow for an exploration of the stark contradictions between economic and migration policies in the region between these key sending, transit, and receiving states. On the one hand, Cuba has experienced the longest and most severe economic sanctions by the U.S. embargo, currently lasting 56 years and continuously causing indirect violence in the form of restricted access to medications and resources. On the other hand, Cubans have been the only nationality in the world that the United States permits automatic refugee status upon arriving to the United States. The increase in Cuban migration from 2014-2017 is politically connected to, and even a result of relations “normalizing” between the United States and Cuba. I will explore how the United States migration policies function to turn refugees into migrants in what can be called a “manageable labor cycle.” ii Acknowledgements I would like to thank all of the people that have contributed to helping make this research possible. My deepest gratitude to my professors at the University of Oregon for all their inspiration, their hard questions, and their guidance through this challenging process. I am especially grateful for my Thesis Committee members, Professor Joseph Fracchia, Professor Daniel Tichenor, and Galen Martin. Thank you for your support and critique. It has been a true privilege to study at the Robert D. Clark Honors College, which has provided the curriculum, expertise and structure to make this research experience and opportunity possible. I also extend my gratitude to the academics, intellectuals, students, activists and workers that I had the opportunity of meeting and having conversations with in Oregon, Mexico, Cuba, Guatemala, Geneva and Greece. Many of these conversations led me to ask critical and nuanced questions and to attempt to answer them with their perspectives and lived experiences in mind. Special gratitude to the people in states of migration themselves, for sharing your stories of personal experience with me. iii Table of Contents Introduction 1 Theoretical Framework 12 Historical Context of the U.S.-Cuba Conflict 32 U.S.-Cuba Economic & Migration Policies 44 Case Study: Cuban Migration 2014-2017 64 Analysis 74 Conclusion 96 Appendix 101 Bibliography 104 iv List of Figures Figure 1: “The Neoliberal Cycle” from Deported: Immigrant Policing, Disposable Labor and Global Capitalism by Tanya Golash-Boza. 9 v Introduction Cuba nos une en extranjero suelo, Auras de Cuba nuestro amor desea: Cuba es tu corazón, Cuba es mi cielo, Cuba en tu libro mi palabra sea. -José Martí. It was a blistering and dry afternoon in the summer of 2017 in a small, conservative town north of Thessaloniki, Greece. A couple with two kids opened their current home, a one room apartment on the edge of town, to four students to join them for tea. Sitting together over tea would soon turn in to hours of tea, lunch, and dessert. This family was from Iraq, and the father, who was previously the CEO of an Iraqi company, was violently threatened to turn over all of his assets. Their house was bombed and destroyed, now only a pile of grey rubble, as he displayed on his smartphone for the students to see. At that point, they had already spent years in Greece, waiting for family reunification to Germany, where their other daughter was living with an uncle. They apologized that the apartment was so small and explained that the kitchen in their old house was the size of this current apartment all together. They repeated many times how grateful they were to have the opportunity to host guests in their home, since it was an activity they had done daily in Iraq with neighbors and family. They mentioned frequently how deeply they missed hosting and spending time with others over tea and that they wished they could have been hosting in their old home. After hours of conversation over what seemed like an endless amount of food and desserts, the father said a simple phrase on his thoughts about refugees. With his wife standing beside him, he said, “while there is still one drop of oil in my country, there will be war.” He went on to explain that while there is war, he and his family would remain, either waiting or relocated, as refugees. With war comes displacement of people and refugee policies attempting to respond. Although our conversation referenced a conflict from a completely different region, his particular comment pushed me to consider the parallels of economic interests, displacement, and migration in Latin America, the topic of my ongoing research. After studying international migration in the Americas, the work of other academic researchers as well as conversations with colleagues initially compelled me to ask and respond to necessary questions of how to ensure the protection of the rights of refugees. However, in the process, it became clear that the protection of abstract, procedural rights is continuously deficient, necessitating a critique of the structures that perpetuate the displacement of people, who in effect, become refugees. The general political ideology that shapes the United States immigration and refugee laws are restrictionist and exclusionary. In my personal context, I grew up on the West Coast, observing the criminalization of immigrants and the impacts of mass deportations. In my studies, I saw an ethical dilemma in the contradiction between the violence that Central American and Haitian migrants faced when crossing Mexico to the United States and attempting to seek asylum from persecution and violence in their home countries and the automatic refugee status given to Cubans making the same journey. My research process revealed the necessity of historical analysis when seeking to understand and respond to any conflict. Such historical analysis frames the root ideologies and legal structures of both the United States as a nation-state, as well as the undeniable 2 design of colonialism and imperialism throughout the Americas. Without analyzing to the root causes of displacement of people from their land, the cycle of demanding that the human rights of refugees be protected struggles to create structural results. Such structures are upheld by the power of resources and property to shape policy decisions. This research aims to identify and analyze how ideological and structural defense of economic and political power behind re-creating and protecting private property relates to refugee and asylum policy, including how it impacts displacement of people due to structural cycles of violence. Thus, through a framework of conflict analysis between the United States and Cuba, this research aims to answer the following questions: What are the historical, geopolitical and economic factors that shape the ongoing conflict and the migration and refugee policies between Cuba and the United States? What are the effects of these policies in the lives of Cuban migrants? These questions provide an exploration of the stark contradictions in economic and migration politics in the region between these key sending, transit, and receiving states. The most recent increase in Cuban migration, from 2014-2017, is politically connected to diplomatic relations “normalizing” between the United States and Cuba. Although the term “normalizing” can be misleading. It can more accurately be described as the renewal of overt and public diplomacy, as covert or “back-channel” diplomacy continued throughout the previous decades. In fact, some reported that so called “normalizations” between the United States and Cuba has not changed anything of significance within the country, but has only increased emigration, or those leaving the 3 island. As a result of the overt diplomacy and normalization process between Raul Castro and Barack Obama, starting in December of 2015, many Cubans were rapidly leaving Cuba for the United States in order to arrive before the Cuban Adjustment Act could be eliminated. This migration phenomenon has brought new diversification of migration routes and an amplification of social networks. The characteristics of this new migration pattern illustrate that the demographic of those most recently emigrating from Cuba have financial and social capital, as a trip in total will cost between 10-15 thousand USD. Some Cuban migrants flew to countries like Ecuador1 with a tourist visa and then either flying to the United States or taking buses through Central American countries and Mexico to get to the United States. Others pay thousands of dollars to be smuggled between Miami Cuban American gangs and the Mexican drug gangs. The array of costs to traverse Central America and Mexico to get to the United States should not be normalized or taken for granted as a natural aspect of migration. Despite the peculiarities of the Cuban economic and political system, it is not possible to escape the severities of the global capitalist economy, even when there is a lack of personal fulfillment, generated by the obstacles of their own system, is shown as a vital motivation of migrants… The transnational social spaces accompanying the same development of modernity associated with capitalism.
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